The Top 5 AI Stories This Week

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're counting down the 5 most important stories in AI this week. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:18Hello, friends. Doing something a little bit different today? I've done this before, but I'm coming back to it. We're doing a countdown episode, sort of a weekly recap, weekly summary. A lot of you liked the last one I did a few weeks ago. I'm not sure yet if this will become a regular thing or if I'll do it just every once in a while, but I thought it would be a fun change of pace for today. So let me know how you like it, and let's dive in. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today, as I said, we are counting down the top stories in AI this week, and we're actually going to start off with a product launch and a couple of honorable mentions.

0:48The product launch of the week, I have to give to Luma Lab's new Dream Machine video generation. There was so much hype all over Twitter for this thing. Indeed, if you had just looked at the conversation on X, you would have thought that Luma dropped something that blew Sora out of the water. Now, when push came to shove and people actually dug in, the quality was not Sora level, at least the Sora examples we've seen. But while it may not have been as visually advanced as that forthcoming sometime model from OpenAI, it had something very important going for it, which is that it was available. One of the use cases that emerged that really showed off Dream Machine's capacity was animating different memes.

1:30Even Andre Karpathy, one of the founding members of OpenAI said, wow, the new model from Luma Labs extending images into videos is really something else. I understood intuitively that this would become possible very soon, but it's still something else to see it and think through future iterations of it. The story of the Luma launch, for anyone paying attention out there, is to one, have a product that people can actually use, and two, lean all the way into the power of social media as a distribution channel to get people excited about their creations. Next up, we move over to an honorable mention, a super cool thing that was announced this week is called the ARK Prize.

2:03It's a$1 million competition to beat the ARK AGI benchmark and open source the solution. It's hosted by a co-founder of Zapier and a very prominent deep learning expert from Google, and has a bunch of other great people like Greg Kamrat, who's been on the show before, as part of their team. Let's watch the quick intro video. Progress towards AGI has stalled. LLMs are trained on an unimaginably vast amount of data, yet remain unable to adapt to simple problems they haven't been trained on. Frontier AI research has become closed source. We need new ideas to move forward. ARC Prize, a million-dollar competition to open source AGI progress and beat the only AI benchmark that measures general intelligence.

2:51Visit ARCPrize.org. So on ARCprize.org, you can see more about each of the different parts that you just heard in that announcement. They point out that skill is different than intelligence, that general intelligence requires the ability to acquire new skills, that there is only one formal benchmark for AGI, which is the abstraction and reasoning corpus for artificial general intelligence, and that an open source solution is key. It is a super cool project. Again, the URL is ARCprize.org. Go check it out. Get involved. We'll certainly be keeping track of it here on the show. Second honorable mention is a story that just launched on Bloomberg, where one of the founders of Hugging Face told a reporter from Bloomberg that he's hearing from about 10 AI startups a week that want to sell themselves to Hugging Face.

3:33So why is this notable? I've seen a lot more discussion recently around whether we're moving into a consolidation period where the glut of AI companies is starting to whittle down, where it's getting a little bit harder for AI companies to raise money, and this would certainly be some indication or evidence of that. Now, this is deserving of an entire conversation and one that I'll probably have at some point soon, but I do not in any way believe that a consolidation period in startups is anything other than extremely healthy. The sheer tonnage of entrepreneurial excitement around AI has led to just an incredible amount of companies being formed.

4:06The surface area of new opportunities is just so dissimilar to things that we've had over the last 10 or 15 years. It's also been the one area venture capital that has defied the odds in a shift away from ZERP area investment approaches to operate in the same hype-y venture capital way. A recent crunch-based survey found 40 % of recent VC deals being in the AI space. Inevitably, with those dynamics, you're going to have more companies formed than can possibly win. And to the extent that you believe that the market should be reallocating talent and energy towards companies that are differentiating and starting to win, consolidation is a good thing, not some scary thing that says that the bubble has popped.

4:45But now we move into our top five stories in the week, and the first is kind of a combination of some new entrance to the AI conversation, or at least entrance that are getting louder in a specific context. The first is Pope Francis, who will be joining the G7 specifically to talk about artificial intelligence. This is the first time the G7 will have a pope as an invited participant, and interestingly he's choosing to take his time to focus on why the world needs a coordinated AI strategy. Pope Francis has been talking about this for a couple of years now, and of course was also famously deepfaked with a puffy jacket last year, and basically his shtick is that AI needs to be in the service of people, in the service of the good.

5:23Now what that means practically is of course the devil in the details, but it is certainly notable that he's getting more involved in the conversation. Another notable person who's wading into the AI conversation is former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump starting to discuss AI as well. The specific context for the conversation was a podcast he did with Logan Paul. PhD student James Campbell summed it up like this, Trump on AI, finds it alarming and scary, sees how it could lead to accidental nuclear annihilation, says if it's going to happen, it's going to happen and we can't stop it, says we must beat China, knows training runs or electricity bottlenecked and will fix that as president, received$12 million from unspecified San Francisco super geniuses, used ChatGPT to edit a speech and joked about firing his speechwriters, referred to superintelligence as super-duper AI, realizes this is going to be insanely powerful and acknowledged risk of taking over the human race.

6:13Another commenter pointed out that it wasn't AI in general that he seemed to indicate was scary, but specific applications of it like deepfakes. Love him or loathe him, the fact that Trump is now talking about AI means that its profile in the public discourse is about to go up. And that's why this has a place on our list. Today's episode is brought to you by Super Intelligent. Regular listeners know that Super is our platform for helping people learn how to actually use AI tools. These are not long, laborious courses. These are fun, fast tutorials that get you actually using the world's most interesting and useful AI tools within minutes.

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7:22Number four story this week in AI is around geopolitics. The US is once again considering adding even more limits on China's access to AI chips. According to Bloomberg, the Biden administration is considering limiting China's ability to use a new architecture called Gate All Around, or GAA, the promise of which is to make semiconductors more powerful. No one official commented on this story, but according to Bloomberg sources, a potential draft GAA rule is not yet finalized, and it's quote unclear whether the ban would restrict China's ability to develop its own GAA chips or go further and seek to block overseas companies, particularly US chipmakers, from selling their products to Chinese electronics manufacturers.

8:00There are some credible reasons for the US to continue to be concerned about this. The information recently did an expose called China's NVIDIA loophole, how ByteDance got the best AI chips despite US restrictions. The loophole is pretty simple. As the information puts it, the US government forbids NVIDIA from selling some of its most advanced AI chips to customers in China, but it doesn't stop Chinese firms from buying or renting NVIDIA's chips if they're used within the US. So ByteDance, the information points out, which is of course the owner of TikTok, has been renting NVIDIA's best chips from Oracle.

8:29This is of course strongly outside of the intent of those rules, and so it's not surprising that the U.S. is trying to close these types of loopholes. What's more, one of the areas of loopholes that the U.S. has been trying to close are Chinese access to AI chips via proxies in the Middle East. A UAE minister says that U.S. fears about that are actually quite valid. Omar al-Ulama, the UAE minister of AI and digital economy, told Bloomberg, quote, I think concerns about chips coming to the Middle East and going to China are valid concerns for any country that has adversaries. He added, we think the UAE has proven to be a strategic partner with the U.S.

9:02Sometimes you are a victim of the neighborhood you're in. The other small geopolitics story is some perhaps surprising comments from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where he came out certainly more accelerationist than AI safetyist. He basically said that we shouldn't be overly concerned about dystopian sci-fi type scenarios, and that the approach to AI concerns of slowing it down is unlikely to work, and instead we should be focused on building AI for good. It strikes me as part of a somewhat broader shift we're seeing in mainstream political discourse around AI, but it's still too early to know how deep that shift is.

9:35Number three most important story this week, OpenAI is doing well financially. Or at least, it's continuing to grow. Last summer, reports were that OpenAI's revenue run rate was around$1 billion annually, by the end of the year it was between$1.6 and$2 billion, and now over the last six months, it seems to have doubled to$3.4 billion. Interestingly, if this information is correct, and it comes from Sam Altman talking to staff, then OpenAI seems to be doing a lot better than Microsoft at selling OpenAI software. Only$200 million or so of that$3.4 billion came from their partnership with Microsoft, and Altman said that that$200 million represented around 20 % of Microsoft's revenue from OpenAI software, which would of course put Microsoft's revenue from OpenAI software at a billion dollars as compared to this$3.4 billion for OpenAI itself.

10:22I'm not exactly sure what to make of that yet, but it is notable to me. Another OpenAI story which is just broken and I haven't had a chance to dig into too deeply yet is that they've appointed a new board member, former NSA head Paul Nakasone. He's a retired U.S. Army general and former head of the National Security Agency. And boy, are many people not happy about this. Edward Snowden writes, They've gone full mask off. Do not ever trust OpenAI or its products, ChatGPT, etc. There is only one reason for appointing an NSA director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.

10:56You have been warned. Mario Nafal summed up the news, saying that Nakasone's appointment will help improve AI's role in cybersecurity by detecting and responding to threats quickly, and that his appointment follows concerns over safety culture at OpenAI. But the top comment on that comes from Elon Musk, who said, can't wait for OpenAI to have access to my phone, dot, dot, dot. Expect to hear more on this controversial appointment in the weeks to come. Bundling in with this story still in this number three slot is that Mistral, another frontier model competitor, has increased its war chest as well, adding over$600 million at a valuation above$6 billion.

11:31This one-year-old company is of course taking a slightly different path and is very clearly identifying OpenAI as the challenger that it's trying to beat. One small note that you might have seen, some sources are reporting this as close to$6 billion. The Financial Times, for example, says the valuation was 5.8, while other companies are reporting it as 6.4 billion. This is just a choice on whether you're reporting pre-money or post-money. In other words, Mistral was valued at 5.8 billion, but then added$645 million in cash, which means that it is now worth 6.45 billion because that cash has a one-to-one value of a dollar for each dollar raised.

12:07Conservative European papers tend to focus on the pre-money number, which is lower, while American news outlets are, of course, talking about the biggest number possible. Number two story is the AI candidates for public office. There are not one but two of these stories floating around the news this week. In Wyoming, an AI avatar named Vic or Virtual Integrated Citizen is running for mayor via someone named Victor Miller, who says that they will use the AI to make all the decisions if it is elected. Miller said, I realize that this entity is way smarter than me and more importantly, way better than some of the outward facing public servants I see.

12:39Writes Wired, Miller added that he'll serve as Vic's meat puppet to sign documents and attend meetings and other in-person events. Over in the UK, an AI candidate is also running for parliament. The candidate is named AI Steve and is running for parliament in Brighton. Very similarly, it's represented by a businessman named Steve Endicott, and it's a whole approach to try to get more direct representation in government. On the one hand, it would be easy to write these things off as novelties, and I'm sure that's how many people will initially treat them. However, I do think there is a trend of disenfranchisement with the existing political process in such a way that it could open up possibilities that people would rather have some AI avatar who can take in a bunch of information and make decisions based on that data rather than personal preference as simply a better approach to leading.

13:23We'll see, of course, what if any traction these candidates get. But for now, I think it would be a mistake to just write it off as fun clickbait. Lastly today, our number one story with a bullet this week is, of course, the launch of Apple intelligence. As Apple puts it, AI for the rest of us. After a huge number of questions and a significant amount of waiting, we finally are starting to get the idea of what Apple's AI strategy is going to be. And what clearly stands out is that this company believes that the way that AI will enter most people's lives is through very simple day-to-day sort of uses.

13:56It will be simpler, better ways of doing the same things we're already doing, not revolutionary, professional, or creative use cases. It's a fascinating stance, one that makes a ton of sense for Apple, and so far has been very validated in the market, which temporarily made Apple the most valuable company in the world again after the announcement. Now the proof will of course be in the pudding, and we won't really be able to get our hands on it until the fall with iOS 18, but for now Apple has taken a strong stance on AI and is officially in the game. That is going to do it for this countdown edition of the AI Daily Brief.

14:26Let me know if you like this type of episode and maybe we'll do it more, and until next time, peace.

14:41Cold Jar